


Instantiation and Processing of Grief Among The Sith

by ParadifeLoft



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: Background Polyamory, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Femslash February, Lesbian Character of Color, Sith attempts at problem-solving, neurodivergent POV character, the consumption of Ziost and related events
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-18 10:44:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5925573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadifeLoft/pseuds/ParadifeLoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darth Nox has returned to the planet she was born on for the first time since leaving for the Sith Academy. It is not an ideal homecoming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Denial and Destruction

In the silence of the shuttle, light had taken over from sound to be deafening. Lana had handed off Surro to her underlings, whichever of them still survived, to board another bound for the station - now it was simply the two of them, and the pair of impassively-helmeted guards that had taken position flanking her when they arrived at the port. They did nothing to set Ahriss at ease.

No, instead of the solid security that such an entourage was presumably intended to provide - what she herself would associate with Khem Val at her back - these guards were... another task her consciousness was forced to process by simple virtue of its existence. In short, an irritation to her already-overtaxed senses. A part of her longed for it all to stop and just go away; a larger part wished for a window, to see the planet below and provide an anchor to her strategising, that she might voice in whatever impassioned ramble it might come to her. Lana could play sounding board.

But Ahriss hated the thought of just leaving _him_ there, letting his _activities_ out of metaphorical (and, she supposed, literal) sight for even the short shuttle ride, for the time they would take on the station to recoup. Strategy, tactics, she was an ardent proponent of - but this was a continuously evolving crisis. She couldn't shake the feeling that to properly respond, she would need to be on the most immediate ground.

That, and she _knew_ the only possible solution to something like this, despite the military's frantic need to do something and resultant posturing, was ritual. But of course all her libraries were a ship away, a planet away... She could open a comm line to Zash when she was back on the station.

When she was back on the station.

The tyrannies of _time_ made Ahriss's insides itch and scream.

"Dark Lord."

Lana's murmur, exhausted and anxious, nudged aside Ahriss's incessantly-barreling thoughts, hooking them into a temporary sound-proof containment. She refocused with a touch of effort on her immediate surroundings... ah. She'd begun a frantic and nearly arrhythmic drumbeat with her foot against the floor. It stopped.

The flight continued in silence, and Ahriss attempted to quiet her useless energy by sinking into the Force, a meditative-like immersement to occupy her thoughts and give her some awareness of the events outside this shuttle. _Attempted_ being the operative word, because without her focusing icons much less in _this_ state, it was a nearly futile task. Lana of course seemed able to manage, despite the anxiety Ahriss could nonetheless feel from her… she envied her that.

 

Docking at the orbital station hardly came soon enough. As the airlocks hissed and whirred, a minor skirmish erupted inside her regarding how much she cared to observe the protocol that would have the commandos accompanying them exit the shuttle before the Sith Lords… When the door began sliding open, she abruptly decided it in favour of her impatience, damn how it would _look_ ( - wasn’t that one of the perks of being Sith and powerful, that social rules needn’t always apply to you?) and nearly sprang to her feet, striding through the hatch and down the ramp with an intensity that made the soldiers stationed outside step reflexively back.

Her feet had barely contacted the station’s floor when the Force itself _trembled_.

Ahriss stopped in her tracks, attention ratcheted to hypervigilance on top of her existing alertness, and instinctively stretched her awareness out, barreling through the information that flooded her senses in search of the disturbance’s cause.

Back on the planet, below, of course, and not hard to find.

In similar alarm, Lana came through the shuttle hatch just as Ahriss found the spirit and his suddenly – inexplicably – growing, towering power spike in the Force; shouting orders to the nearest officers and planetary monitor techs in the vicinity, her voice echoing bell-like in its volume. Ahriss barely processed the words. Tech reports were a tool for one thing, but here, already attuned to the presence at the source of each disturbance – she strode to the viewport, taking in the clouded, lightning-strewn view of the planet below with her vision and letting the sensory data further anchor her delving into the currents of the Force at its surface. Responses to Lana’s inquiries were traded frantically back.

 

Then the deaths began.

 

The shock of it, sudden and unexpected and _ripping_ , unnatural _tearing_ , spirits pulled direct from their bodies and the energy released from those bonds, all as though it was happening immediately _next_ to her – sent Ahriss crumpling to her knees, hands suddenly stinging the durasteel floor, vision going temporarily grey-black. Dizziness engulfed her physically but in the Force she could suddenly _see_ , all of it clear and laid out before her in a single pure, powerful intention –

She let out a scream that sent a number of Imperials in the room reeling back, cringing, covering their ears and squeezing their eyes shut as the overflow of the power she touched escaped through her throat along with the sound. She shoved herself to her feet, throwing herself forward toward the viewpoint and pressing her hands against it, staring at the planet – _her_ planet – as the lightning storms increased, clouds roiled –

 _“No, no, no!”_ she screeched again, fury rolling through her voice and the air around her, through her body and limbs as she smashed a fist repeatedly against the transparisteel, as if it might allow her instantaneous passage to the planet surface below – _“You filthy fucking coward! Disgraceful traitor, I will_ burn _you until your very_ essence _is destroyed! – "_

The burning rage, the stress of the crisis following on the past few months, tore past the flimsy wall of Ahriss’s usual concern and caution, and with the whim catching her, she grabbed onto the unmistakable signature of Vitiate in the Force, launching the majority of her consciousness through the expanse of space between them until it was as though they stood face-to-face, his intense power making the visual aid of a ghost’s form unnecessary for her to focus her power.

 _“You think to take this world then I will_ bind _your useless excuse for a soul until you are nothing but another source of_ my _power, unworthy – "_

 

A moment later her senses went violently black as the link between them was forcibly severed, a sensation like being slammed into a wall, and she was falling again – no, held and near dragged upward, prevented from falling, arms about her waist from behind.

“My lord, no you _cannot_ attempt binding Vitiate, you have no idea what that will _do_ to you, " – Lana’s voice, Lana’s presence behind her and Lana’s signature on the steel-lined curtain cutting her off from him –

“ – this is not like your previous ghosts, I don’t _care_ what immunities you think you have, we simply _don’t know_ the limits of his power, what danger that might unleash on all of us here – "

 

The tang of blood filled Ahriss’s mouth; in her howling, struggling physically and in the Force had she bitten her tongue? – the sensation of binds being torn one after another and another, overwhelming – _New Adasta, the triumphant return of those that had been lost, scattered in the galaxy after Sadow’s debacle, returned_ home _and rededicating the revival of their civilisation amongst this salvation they had scarcely thought to hope for_ – _burning, all those lives snuffed out and that symbol snuffed out – they had called him_ Sith’ari –

“ – I will _not_ have him in your mind the way he tried to invade mine – "

She pushed _outward_ , throwing a wave of kinetic energy from her in a sizeable blast radius, and in a blink the physical and mental restraints on her were severed. A stuttering thud and _oof_ of breath being knocked from someone’s chest sounded behind her. She tried to reach out again, seize his spirit again and squeeze it into a miniscule, disabling fraction of itself… There were too many inputs from too many sources.

 

Like dust settling, the severing of lives from bodies slowly diminished, and finally broke off.

 

When Ahriss’s head cleared enough for her to open her eyes, lift herself up to sit, she could feel Lana’s hand on her shoulder. Her other against Ahriss’s back. Loose hair just above the juncture between collar and neck. Her spirit felt hollowed.

 

On the planet below, the lightning had ceased.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this verse, Darth Zash doesn't die or get imprisoned in a Rakatan mind trap, but instead Nox has a new body created for her by Ashaa/the Mother Machine on Belsavis after ascending to the Dark Council, and binds her once more to her service in the same way as Khem Val.


	2. Depression and Fury

The Dromund Kaas sky hadn’t changed, in the past few days, from the habits that had been its constant since Lana was a child. And yet now, she found the shifting grey fortresses of clouds brought an unquiet to her mind along with their rain. At least her office in the Citadel - for all the resentments that went unspoken among the personnel there, unhappily reorganized into her new scaffolding - lacked windows. The suites of the towering building Nox lived in appeared to be little _but_ windows. Mirrored ones, but… still. It wasn’t people looking in from the outside that she wanted to avoid right now.

The building’s security desk on the ground floor only reached the tinny echoing voice of a protocol or steward droid when they called up to ask Lana’s admittance, but the statement it gave was apparently enough for the armored Imperial soldier stationed there to assent and provide directions. What a surreal job it must be, she mused, while she let her body go through the motions of operating the elevator. Directing visitors to the apartment of a member of the Dark Council.

Perhaps Lana only considered that surreal because she _wished_ her attention could be occupied by such a mundane thing these days.

The elevator ride passed in a blur of vagueness hanging about Lana’s memory, one she didn’t _like_ but nonetheless felt wary of attempting to drive away – who knew what might burst up from lurking underneath if she chased it out. She was able to focus on her work, and that was the critical piece right now – if her disposition suffered, as she knew it was despite not wishing to admit knowing it, so be it. She had accepted the position. She could have turned her back and said no… It had not been much of a choice.

Lord Nox’s door buzzer also summoned a steward droid, it seemed; thankfully, one sensible enough or programmed well enough to make itself scarce after the usual initial offers of physical hospitality and Lana’s polite decline. And yet Her Lordship still hadn’t emerged to greet her… Lana felt reasonably certain, in light of their previous encounters, that this should be taken for unusual behaviour – not Nox’s customary treatment of guests who she’d, after all, assented to see in her own home.

Perhaps coming here would turn out to be a fortuitous choice in itself, and not just an exercise in self-indulgent listlessness.

It occurred to Lana as she left the foyer for a central corridor, branching off into several different rooms including a good few with closed doors, that for all the directions and welcome, she hadn’t actually been told where to _find_ the apartment’s owner - understandably as a general principle, but a cause of difficulty here… And she’d already dismissed the droid. Damn.

But when she began a room-by-room excavation down the main hallway, calling just above her normal voice to see where Nox might have been, it only took twice for the droid to come toddling up to her with a slight mechanical clank to inform her that its master was upstairs in the study, “last it had checked of course; it is conceivable she might have very recently moved”. Lana did thank it for that.

The door to the study when Lana got to it was only partially opened, and she knocked for courtesy’s sake before sliding in through the gap, peering around the doorframe. “Dark Lord?”

Darth Nox indeed sat at the study’s desk, hunched over the surface and looking almost oblivious. Sat almost as if perching on the chair and ready to stand from it at any moment to pace with nervous energy. When Lana spoke, her head jolted up, molten-gold eyes wide rather than alert; and just as predicted, she stood.

Her customary hooded robe was gone, replaced with a tight black shell and, most surprisingly, leggings rather than a long skirt. Her hair, too, had been unwrapped from the tight bun she usually kept it in, spilling loose black coils down her back. If the only context Lana had seen her in was professional, she might hardly have recognised the woman. Being the person who wouldn’t recognise her might have hurt less.

“Lana.” A flicker of brief microexpressions rotated through Nox’s face, though she held her body and limbs carefully stiff and still. How odd it was to see her not constantly _moving_. “I was… going to come meet you…”

There was no politic, much less nice, way to confirm the obvious. “You don’t mind my dropping by, do you?” Not that she would have made it this far if Nox _did_ object, but for all she’d wanted to see her, words were slow in coming. What did you say to someone you’d seen last as unwilling co-hosts of a wake for a planet?

There was another change in her expression, to something unreadable, and even the Force told Lana little besides – rawness. Seeing Nox’s inner state like this, even just passively, felt suddenly intrusive, and Lana turned away briefly as she drew a light shield about her own mind. Politeness, or comfort, either way. She might have indulged a few times in a desire to overshare with words, when keeping silent amid her thoughts and uncertainties became too much, a weakness she knew… but Nox had always before now kept her own mental shields robust, kept the chief external displays of her displeasure to anger and determination. She didn’t want to overstep their boundaries of propriety, or make a hypocrite of what she’d said before they parted ways on Yavin, simply because of her own desires and the unusual stress of the situation.

For that matter, a Dark Councilor was not someone to easily accept being taken advantage of, once the compromising moment had passed.

Nox had begun to pace very slowly, a sort of rocking back and forth on her feet in the vague direction of the chairs against the wall opposite her desk. When she noticed Lana looking at her again, she held a hand out. “Sit?” Lana nodded and obliged, and thought for a moment that Nox might join her, but the other woman stayed on her feet, still slightly in motion before the second chair. “I had… assumed you would be working around the clock, after this,” she murmured flatly. Did it count as small talk when it implicitly, almost explicitly, touched on a subject of such dramatic import?

“I was,” Lana replied, looking down at her knees, easier than looking at the standing Dark Lord from her own sitting position. She wanted no deference for herself, but every citizen of the Empire was brought up to know the proper respect for others in her bones. “After thirty-one hours my colleagues insisted I go home to rest.” The Force-blind ones, a fact she’d noted to them in protest of their demands, because they _didn’t_ and most likely couldn’t understand that the limits of one’s body were different when you commanded the Force – but even the Force wasn’t much of a shield against constant questions and pestering intentionally aimed at keeping her from working so long as she remained at the Citadel.

To Lana’s surprised, Nox actually stopped pacing at that, cracking a bit of a lopsided smile. It only emphasised the circles under her eyes, the smudged makeup that must have been a day or two old, the unnerving dullness of her usually rich red-brown skin – but even so, the intention behind it did provide a slight comfort.

“Elana commed me a few hours ago and said if I wasn’t home before she had to leave for work, she’d come down to the Citadel herself and drag me out in public view of all the other Sith,” she replied, by way of explanation for the grin. “It was deeply unfair of her, considering we _both_ know she wouldn’t do something to put my career in jeopardy like that, and also that _I_ wouldn’t chance it. Or put her in the position of deciding to break her word or endanger me.”

Nox finally sat as well, perched at the edge of the chair just as she had been at her desk.

“Lady Thul is working _now_?” Lana asked, surprised, though it would explain her absence from the apartment at least. Night had well and truly fallen since she’d arrived, and Diplomacy’s Imperial Integration staff didn’t seem the sort of department to require odd hours.

“She said lots of people are being temporarily shuffled to take on additional workloads, because of the… refugee crisis,” replied Nox. Her animation had faded once more. Lana suddenly wished she hadn’t asked – and it was something she should have guessed on her own.

Neither of them said anything for a time. Lana had, she realised with a modicum of shame, come here not simply because she desired company, nor certainly not with the intention of providing her lord the comfort that jumped to mind when she’d entered the apartment. She wanted the resonance of another mind in the Force that was similarly tied to the disaster suffusing her thoughts. A selfish intimacy she had no right to expect. But that she’d knowingly cut herself off from the possibility, even for good reasons… It sent a broad, deep pang through her chest, and she ducked momentarily behind her hair.

“Lana, …” Nox’s voice, slow, less sharp than usual. A pressure that felt… warm, edging against a more piercing heat, and prickly like static, nudged up against Lana’s mental barrier. She looked up.

“I don’t know how much… digging, you did on me. I mean, it’s just in my basic database profile, it’s not like you’d need to go very far – Lana, I _grew up_ on Ziost. I was born there. I worked on New Adasta’s municipal infrastructure until they sent me to Korriban, for the Lords’ sake! – and how many people would want to hear me say that.”

How many people, indeed. Despite the shield, she felt a stab of empathy – and what unique dimension must be added, when it wasn’t failure to accomplish a task set as your responsibility, but to accomplish one you _felt_ as yours that nobody else would want to acknowledge. After a few moments, Lana let the shield fade to a sliver, and reached out, tentatively, for Nox’s presence. The warmth indeed flared into a harsher heat, the sort of slight pain you’d get leaving your hand over a flame a bit too long, with a slight pop and crackle of electricity, or dry logs feeding the flame. The emotions shifting within that presence were harsher than the last time Lana had opened herself to feel her lord’s passions – now suffused with a low burning hatred that nonetheless felt just as infectiously energising.

With only a slight warning, Nox leaned forward and pulled Lana’s hand up from the chair arm, threading their fingers together and pressing their palms tight and warm against one another. Her face was – intense, _alive._ Something not-unpleasant rose in Lana’s chest, choking off a bit of her breath. Perhaps somehow she _had_ helped, despite the selfishness of her intentions, and…

“This isn’t something I’m letting you deal with alone,” Nox said. Her voice was low and fierce – and full of promises of bloody vengeance, power, that reminded Lana of much of why she found this woman so captivating.

“…Dark Lord – ”

Nox interrupted her with a raise of an eyebrow.

“ _You_ are very welcome to just call me Ahriss.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In addition to her relationship with Lana (...and others less relevant to the current story), Ahriss is by this point married to Elana Thul from the Alderaan class story for the Sith Inquisitor. Elana lives with Ahriss on Dromund Kaas part-time, and is employed by the Sphere of Expansion and Diplomacy doing work with planets interested in joining the Empire. (The rest of the time, she spends either on Alderaan or traveling for work.)


	3. Vengeance

At some point during the night, the rain outside had crawled to a slow drizzle, and inside, Lana had stolen a majority of the blankets. Ahriss had awoken covered by only a thin sheet – though with the ambient air temperature in the apartment raised since her wife had arrived from Alderaan, she didn’t mind. Quilts on top of the average human’s preferred warmth left her overheated. Lana, with a greater ratio of human to sith blood in her lineage, evidently didn’t mind; not to mention that she was still asleep, if her lack of reaction to the movement in the bed was anything to go by.

Pushing aside the small bit of sheet left to her, Ahriss swung her legs over the side of the bed and stepped down. Pleasant as such company could be when she was in the mood for it, this morning (as there was a faint bit of light peeking down through the clouds), her body itched for movement rather than continued touch.

Silently, she crossed the bedroom to her wardrobe, and made short work of selecting a clean underskirt in thin knit tuk-wool from the hangers, and a robe of layered silks to go over it. Nothing especially ornate; her work would be her own today, no damned meetings with Marr and Rictus – at least not until Acina’s people finished compiling their report on the Darkstaff. Until her own officers in the Reclamation Service finished their preliminary survey. Until the covert operatives stationed on Coruscant could retrieve Jedi records on a planet called Katarr…

– covert operatives. Despite not even wanting to mentally revisit the subject so soon, Ahriss couldn’t help but wonder if… Not that Lana needed her pestering her about work now _either_ , of all times, when by the sound of it she’d only just been forced out of her office by a hairsbreadth last night. And of course, she wasn’t awake yet to _be_ pestered…

Or apparently she was. As Ahriss turned, fastening the buttons up the inside of her robe, she saw Lana now rolled to her other side, face visible instead of her back, eyes soft but unmistakably open. “Thinking of something?” Lana murmured, watching. One of her hands lay resting on the empty half of the bed.

“Work,” Ahriss replied, unenthused, before she had the time to think, and immediately regretted it at the sight of Lana’s face pinching unhappily. She moved back over toward the bed, pulling hair out from her collar and searching for something to say that might salvage the situation. There was something small but uncomfortable lurking beneath her skin. “I was contemplating the joy of freedom from the incessant company of _old men_.”

Lana gave an obliging smile, the sort that came when she was partially, but not wholly, amused by the witticisms Ahriss would surround herself with, as if they were luxurious cloth. “You don’t enjoy spending time with your fellow councilors?” she replied.

Ahriss sat on the edge of the bed again, looking down at her with a jaded, sarcastic expression. “If the Dark Council enjoyed each other’s presence, I doubt I’d even be here.” Because she’d won her kaggath fair twice over, but if Marr, Mortis, Ravage, the others, had wanted to play favourites as they were undoubtedly capable of doing…

“That’s a depressing thought.”

Ahriss scoffed, though without force or venom. “All my thoughts these days are depressing.” Truly, she was doing a great job of cheering Lana up.

Lana sighed, and pulled herself partially out of the blankets, sitting up against the pillowed headboard. Her body, adorned by simple nightclothes rather than robes and armour, looked vulnerable in that moment in a way Ahriss found unfamiliar, unnerving. “I can’t say I blame you. I didn’t exactly do you any favours, getting you involved in this mess, did I?” A low bleed of pain surrounded her in the Force.

And Ahriss herself had only gotten her own hurricane-strewn landscape of a mind under some semblance of control barely hours ago. (A poor semblance.) They couldn’t continue like this.

“Not _any_ favours? Really? Thanks to you, I got to ransack the Jedi Temple.” She paused, let her gaze slip downward as she brushed her hand across the bedsheets. “And you wouldn’t consider _this_ a favour…? Or is it that instead you see it as _my_ favour to _you_?”

That one produced a smile, if not a large one; and a slight pinkness on her cheeks. “You’re insufferable, you know that?”

Ahriss returned the smile with an almost smug one of her own.

They were quiet for a time, Ahriss uncertain where to go with her mind flitting about to a dozen different thought fragments at once, until Lana pulled herself fully out of the bedclothes. She rose to stand.

“May I dress your hair?”

It was not what she’d been expecting. Though – not entirely irrelevant. Despite already having her robes arranged, Ahriss’s long fall of curls was yet unbound, in either the utilitarian bun or traditional sith aristocrats’ styles she preferred.

She looked doubtfully at Lana, glance taking in the straight, blonde locks framing her face, tousled from the past night. “Do you know how to?”

“It was something I did for a lot of my friends when I was a child,” Lana explained, looking off to the side, out the window into the still-falling rain. “They had a lot of different hair textures among them. I suppose it was the closest I could come to getting my own styled, back then, so it was… rewarding.” Her hands, which she’d clasped before her as she spoke, twisted with a hint of uncertainty for a moment, before coming to rest back at her sides. She looked back at Ahriss.

Well, it was certainly a luxury she rarely indulged in. Back before the Hyperspace War, the task would usually fall to a lord’s servants or slaves; in the community of her childhood, members of one’s family. But neither situation was entirely applicable here, with herself and Elana so often in different places, and droids rather than slaves managing the keeping of her house.

“Very well then,” she announced, confidence in her voice if not in – the unease that plagued the shallows of her mind. She beckoned Lana follow her to the vanity, sitting against the wall opposite the windows.

Leaning back in her chair, Lana’s fingers against her scalp; gentle tugging through each section of hair, as she combed away the knots from several nights of carelessness – Ahriss might have been tempted back into a pleasurably sated doze. Would have, in any other situation, but the absence of chatter now instead allowed her thoughts to drift, to balefully fix themselves below the surface on the unresolved source of her unease. Why had she let herself think of her childhood home –

The families she’d grown up amongst were, isolated, safe enough thoughts; even the memory of losing her own, dispassionate (was it memory any more, or simply recitation?) – she had passion enough from fury alone, love as determination as fury; she did not need heartbreak –

Not a one of them would be able to survive as they had been. If any individual was still alive, and _that_ was a thought she would not delve into even now, twenty six years old and just learning the meaning of forbidden knowledge… But the world they had made was now hollowness and dust. The history preserved, practised as the base of all her knowledge of what it was to be sith, the inspiration for what she wished to bring back, _needed_ to return to this place called an empire if her leadership was to mean anything at all –

Erased. Stolen for mere sustenance by the being who thought he deserved their reverence.

And now, Ahriss could almost feel it, again, ghost of the creation of ghosts. And she had tried to stop it –

She shuddered.

Outside the encircling confines of her own head, Lana halted her movements, the service that Ahriss was so thoughtlessly squandering, and looked down at her with a worried brow. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

What could even be said about this? When she thought she’d bared the parts of her soul scraped raw already, last night, let the blood well up from the wounds and be siphoned away. But no, she realised – it would only open, again, and again, until it was stitched shut.

“I’m… remembering it. More of it,” Ahriss murmured, watching her own face reflected in the mirror, Lana’s form tall behind her. Though again, she _knew_ what had happened, the rote description, her own recollections of the day on Ziost, the time after, had splintered into a host of fragments, frantic impressions, emotions pasted hastily onto written reports, as her ship took her back to Dromund Kaas in the aftermath. Time disintegrated in the jump between realspace and hyperspace, and – a new home enforced upon her before she’d even realised if the old one _was_. Had she considered the notion of _home_ in the years before going to Korriban? That, she couldn’t remember either. Only something that shaped her, that was now _stolen_ –

And she was a Lord of the Sith. Power incarnate.

Lana had remained silent after the pronouncement, watching Ahriss in turn, patient, waiting for her to, inevitably, elaborate. She knew her so well.

Ahriss could oblige, willingly. “You were the one who stopped me from binding Vitiate.” _Weren’t you_ , her eyes asked, accused, meeting the reflection of Lana’s as almost a challenge – confirm what I recall. Or deny it, and so confirm anyway. _Or_ , the third option, silence, with the same outcome – Ahriss’s face began to slide away from its impassiveness. “I don’t know whether I want to thank you or hit you for it.”

Lana’s brow furrowed in the mirror. “My lord – ”

“ – _Ahriss –_ ”

“ – with _respect_ ,” (and it was a boon to interact with fellow Sith, where it was mutually understood that respect did not preclude anger; quite the opposite) – “perhaps you are arrogant enough to believe you could do that without repercussions.” She’d taken her hands from Ahriss’s hair, clasped them in front of her around the comb she still held. “But I’ve been around longer than you have, Lord Nox. And I am not willing to sacrifice your life for an unknown _chance_ of defeating him.”

When had the urge to move seized her again? But Ahriss had no reason not to give in to her restlessness now, and so she stood, abrupt, chair legs giving a small whine of protest against the floor. She paced small paths that became a distance away from the vanity, enabled by the large swathes of space within the room, uncluttered by the devices, the datapads, and tablets, and scrolls upon scrolls of crumbling yucca-paper, that inhabited her studies.

(Toovee had asked about cleaning the rooms, after one particularly frustrating night that left her near throwing half the clutter into the wall; but invaluable though it was in every _other_ household task she found little time and less capacity for, she was not about to let a _droid_ handle millennia-old requisitions from pre- _jen’ari_ -era tombs - )

“Maybe you _should_ be willing!” she shot back at Lana, who’d widened her stance but made no moves to follow her. “You were talking all about living up to your new responsibilities the other day; maybe you should concern yourself with _that_ , and trust _me_ to know what my own limits are!”

That got a flare of anger in the Force from where Lana stood; an affronted narrowing of eyes and drawing together of brows, her mouth pulling open as an instantaneous reply presumably sprung to mind –

( – such a kissable mouth, plump lips and tall bow and so _soft_ , and – )

“My lord. Ahriss.” Her voice was strained. “If I were to come to you right now, with a ritual, that said if you sacrificed your life, it would bring back all the people on Ziost. Would you do it?”

Ahriss stilled, and tension clenched her jaw as she stared at the other woman. She said nothing.

“I understand your point,” Lana continued, after several long, static-electric moments of their standoff. Quieter, softened. No longer quite meeting her eyes, but not so far gone as to look away, either. “Believe me, I understand it perfectly well. If the situation had only been slightly different… But sometimes I get tired of sacrificing friendships to tactical decisions.”

Ahriss had no easy response to that. Tactics, she wanted to say, tactics were everything – power came from your passions, but _you_ had to be the one to shape them; letting yourself be tied back from your objectives wasn’t freedom. But Lana knew that, would have already considered that, surely. And her conscience, between unguided passion and true power, was her own struggle, no one else’s.

Ahriss thought of Zash, the advantages she’d gained in remaking her life, binding her service for it. Excuses proffered to those around her who questioned, _why_.

“I… yes,” she replied finally, low and quiet. Admitted. “I do know what you mean.”

Another period of silence followed, attempting to restore some sort of equilibrium between them. A succession of thoughts formed on Ahriss’s tongue in the emptiness, but she swallowed them back with the tatters of self-discipline left to her. They exited in the smothered voice of her slow-pacing feet. Lana did not find movement so compulsory; she remained where she stood, gaze far away through the window’s transparisteel, comb in both hands before her like an anchor.

“Sith are never well-equipped to face helplessness,” Lana said finally, in a tone solemn enough for a confession. Ahriss had the diplomacy, for once, to refrain from commenting that equipment for helplessness was an equipment carried only by the weak.

“Is there something you think should be done?”

Lana turned to face her and, a few moments later, held out the comb. “Only what we’ve already begun to do,” she answered, tone evident that this answer didn’t satisfy her. “If I had any better solution, I wouldn’t have let it go unspoken until now.”

Not satisfying, but at least honest. Patience, was what she always had to caution herself, and here was no different… patience, and the determination of an iron grip ready to close about the galaxy. Ahriss took several steps to narrow the gap, and took the comb back into her own hand.

“What’s being done now is mechanics,” she said, with an oddly calm certainty coming to her in the wake of this exchange. “And that’s not the Empire’s _true_ strength.” Lana didn’t directly respond, but they’d grown to know one another fairly well in the short time since they’d become acquainted. Ahriss knew the accord there from their previous conversations; could feel it in the building blocks linking threads between them in the Force.

“I would aid you in that endeavour,” she replied finally. “If you would have me.”

It was now Ahriss’s turn to stand and watch, her interest piqued and something building there in that moment. The Force shivered - Ahriss could feel it behind her eyes.

“Removing a threat to the galaxy is one thing. But I don’t appreciate being set up for failure.”

Ahriss met Lana’s eyes, grown hard and determined, and answered her with a mirror of the smile she called easily to mind when they had first met. One that promised pain and blood.

“Neither do I.”


End file.
